As if to prove to me that no concession would be made to my imaginary illness, Henry invited guests to dinner twice in a week-though this was an unusual occurrence as a rule-the first time a doctor named Russell, a friend from his club, a thin, clever-faced little man who looked at me with odd intensity from behind the wire frames of his spectacles and talked at length about manias and phobias; the second time Mose, his eyes hard and bright, his smile a razor’s edge.

By the time he set me that dreadful ultimatum my nerves were so ragged, my loneliness so intense that I would have done anything to win him back to me, whether he loved me or not.

Very likely you think me a feeble, contemptible creature. I do myself, I know. I was quite aware that I was being punished for my brief revolt against him at Fanny’s house; if he had wanted to see me he could easily have done so by day, or at least in his rooms; no doubt he thought that the cemetery at midnight, with its shadows, its prowlers, was the ideal setting for the scene of cruel reconciliation I was to share with him. Guessing this, I could not help hating him a little in some hidden part of my heart, but the rest of me loved and wanted him with such a bitter longing that I was prepared to walk into the fire if he asked me to.

Leaving the house was easy; Tabby and Em slept under the roof in the old servants’ quarters-Edwin had his own cottage down the High Street and stopped work when night fell-and Henry slept deeply as a rule, going to bed quite early. At half past eleven I crept out of my room, shielding the candlelight with my hand. I had taken care to wear only a dark flannel dress, with no petticoats, so that I would be silent in the passageway, and so it was in almost total quiet that I drifted down the stairs and into the kitchen. The keys were hanging by the door and, holding my breath, I took the heavy housekey, opened the door and slipped out into the night.

Tizzy was sitting by the door and wound her way around my ankles, purring. For a moment I hesitated, reluctant to leave, feeling oddly comforted by the cat’s presence and half inclined to bundle her in my cloak and take her along. Then, inwardly chiding myself, I pulled the hood of my cloak over my head, shivering, and began to run.

I saw few people as I made my way up Highgate to the cemetery; a child running from the public-house with a pint of ale in a pitcher, a beggar woman wrapped in a ragged shawl wandering listlessly from door to door. At the corner of the street a group of men passed me, smelling of ale, talking in loud voices and clinging to each other as they made their way home. One of them shouted something at me as I ran past them, but they did not follow me. As the streetlamps became wider spaced I tried to merge into the darkness, and after about ten minutes I found myself in front of the great black shape of the cemetery, sprawling against the glowing London sky like a sleeping dragon. It was very quiet, and I was conscious of a quickening of the heart as I moved towards the gates. There was no sign of the night-watchman, and no reason for me to delay, but I stayed fixed to the spot for some time, helplessly watching those gates with the same morbid fascination I had felt as I watched the flap of the red tent open, that day at the fair.

A fleeting memory awakened at the thought, and I imagined those thousands of dead sitting up at my approach, their heads poking out of the stony ground like clockwork toys. The image, there in that thick darkness, was almost too much for me to bear, but remembering that Mose was waiting for me barely a few hundred yards away gave me courage; Mose was not afraid of the dead, nor even the living-he positively revelled in stories of the grotesque and terrifying. He had told me the tale of the woman buried alive; of how she had been found suffocated, her stiff hands clawing the air, her face only a few inches away from the surface, her fingers worn down to the bone as she had tried to dig her way out. And in the year of the cholera epidemic the dead were so many that they had to be buried in mass graves, unmarked and covered with quicklime. The corpses were so numerous that the heat of their decomposition had driven some of them to the surface, where they had been discovered later by two lovers in the cemetery, four heads sticking up out of the ground like huge mushrooms, stinking of death. Mose knew how much I hated his stories; I think that was why he told them, to make fun of my weakness; and I had never before thought how much cruelty there was in his laughter.

The darkness here was almost complete; there were no gaslamps in the cemetery and the moon was a poor, shivering thing, casting a dim corpse-light on to the stones. The scent of earth and darkness was overwhelming; I could pick out the trees by their smell as I passed them: the cedars, laburnums, yews, rhododendrons. From time to time I stumbled against a broken stone or a stump, and the sound of my footsteps terrified me even more than the dense, threatening silence. Once I thought I heard footsteps somewhere behind me and I shrank behind a vault, my heart’s pounding shaking the whole of my body. The footsteps were heavy and, as I remained motionless in the black shadow, I thought I could hear the sound of someone breathing, a thick asthmatic sound like a bellows.

I was almost at the Circle of Lebanon now, with only the long alley of trees to navigate before I reached its safety, but I could not move, sick with terror. For an instant my sanity spiralled away into the night like a shower of confetti; I was left in a timeless wilderness, horribly far from the light. Then, as my power of thought returned, I felt the world stabilize a little. I slipped to my knees, feeling my way along the side of the vault with fingers which had suddenly become miraculous points of sensation. Silently I crawled. As the footsteps moved closer I froze again, straining my eyes in vain for any sign to identify the intruder. I felt mud and water seep through my skirts, but flattened myself against the ground regardless, pulling my hood over my hair so that its whiteness should not betray me. The footsteps came closer still; now they were almost upon me. I held my breath, tasting eternity. The footsteps had stopped. Glancing over my shoulder like Orpheus, in spite of myself, I saw a man’s shape against the dim sky, impossibly huge and menacing, his eyes two points of brightness in the eye of the night.

I know, I know. I was deliberately cruel. And I enjoyed it, too, stalking her through the graves as panic overtook her, watching her trying to hide, falling, slipping, and finally running her to earth, picking her up from the muddy path and having her cling to me like a child, her tears soaking the loose hair which straggled around her face. Now I could afford to be generous; she was mine once more.

As I comforted her, I began at last to understand a little of Henry Chester; the power I had over her was fundamentally erotic, her tears the strongest of aphrodisiacs. For the first time in my dissolute life a woman was mine, body and soul. She was poignantly eager to please, devouring my face with her lips in sweet repentance. She swore she would never try to defy me again and in the same breath vowed she would die if I abandoned her, spinning me in a carousel of different sensations. I fell in love with her all over again; the moment I had begun to think I might tire of her she had come to me, renewed.

Wild words gasped in darkness against my salt hair: ‘Oh, Mose…it tears me body from soul…I need you…I’ll never let you go, never let you leave me…I’d kill you, rather…’ She took a ragged breath, her pale face turning towards mine. For a moment, a trick of reflection from the distant streetlamps revealed her features in dramatic light and shade; her huge eyes black and stark, her lips bruised with shadow, her lovely face distorted in such a grimace of thwarted passion that for a moment I felt uneasy. She looked like some vengeful black angel with madness and death in her outstretched arms. She had already shed her outer clothing and her skin glistened livid in the strange light. She took a step forwards, my name in her mouth like a curse, then she was in my arms with a scent like lavender and earth and sweat clinging to her skin. We made love where we stood, she murmuring her mad nonsense all the time. Afterwards I felt convinced that somehow, in the black climax of my passion, I had made a promise which later I might be required to keep.